resources

Search, AI Search, and Information Retrieval

Freely Available Books

Introduction to Information Retrieval, Manning et al, 2009

Information Retrieval: Implementing and Evaluating Search Engines, 2nd Edition, Croft et al, 2024

Click Models for Web Search, Chuklin et al, 2015

Lecture Notes on Neural Information Retrieval, Tonellotto, arxiv, 2022

An Introduction to Neural Information Retrieval, Mitra et al, Microsoft, 2018

AI-Powered Search, Grainger et al, 2025

Relevant Search, Turnbull, 2016

Blogs

Doug Turnbull’s Blog - https://softwaredoug.com/

Airbnb engineering and data science - https://airbnb.tech/

Zillow AI and ML - https://www.zillow.com/tech/ai-ml/

Linkedin NLP posts - https://www.linkedin.com/blog/engineering/natural-language-processing

Blog posts & resources

Monigatti: 37 Things I Learned About IR, 2025

Doug Turnbull: What AI Engineers Should Know about Search, 2024

Doug Turnbull: What Is a Judgment List?, 2021

Airbnb: How Machine Learning Transforms Voice Support Experience

Airbnb: Embedding-Based Retrieval

Zillow: Designing AI-Driven User Memory for Personalization

Zillow: Guided Search — Personalized Search Refinements

Videos & Lectures

Stanford Natural Language Understanding Series - XCS224U, 2023 notes

An Introduction to Neural Models in Information Retrieval, IIIA Hub, 2022

Information Retrieval from the Ground Up - Philipp Krenn, Elastic, 2025

Papers and paper lists

https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/LLM4IR-Survey (via LLMs for Information Retrieval: A Survey)

http://github.com/quqxui/Awesome-LLM4IE-Papers (via LLMs for Generative Information Extraction: A Survey)

https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/LLM-Agent-for-Recommendation-and-Search (via A Survey of Large Language Model Empowered Agents for Recommendation and Search)

https://github.com/fengranMark/ConvSearch-Survey (via A Survey of Conversational Search)

Library repos

https://github.com/frutik/awesome-search

https://github.com/softwaredoug/local-llm-judge

https://github.com/softwaredoug/searcharray

https://github.com/xhluca/bm25s

Concepts

NLP

https://www.pinecone.io/learn/series/nlp/

Similarity

https://www.elastic.co/docs/reference/elasticsearch/index-settings/similarity

Embeddings

https://www.pinecone.io/learn/series/image-search/

Query Understanding

https://queryunderstanding.com/

Relevance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_feedback

Ranking

Learning To Rank Diversely At Airbnb, Haldar et al, 2022 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.07774 (blog post)

Learning to Rank for Maps at Airbnb, Haldar et al, 2024 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.00091 (blog post)

Beyond Pairwise Learning-To-Rank At Airbnb, Haldar et al, 2025 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09795

Transforming Location Retrieval at Airbnb: A Journey from Heuristics to Reinforcement Learning, Haldar et al, 2024 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13399

https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/improving-search-ranking-for-maps-13b03f2c2cca

Career

https://dtunkelang.medium.com/how-to-be-a-search-consultant-678a44e0cc24